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Near enough to London for government servants to have their chief residences there, Bedfordshire was controlled by three or four inter-related families; some of them, like the Mordaunts, were long-established in the county and others, like the Gascoignes and the St. Johns, more recent arrivals. Eight of the ten known knights could be included in one family tree. All ten held land in Bedfordshire, nine served on the commission of the peace there and seven were sheriffs of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

Sir William Gascoigne and George Acworth, the two knights returned in 1529, may have been crown nominees, for the Bedfordshire writ was one of those called for from Chancery by Henry VIII. Following Acworth’s death in 1530, the names of Sir John St. John and John Gostwick appear against Bedfordshire in Cromwell’s list of vacancies of late 1532 or early 1533, with the preference being given to St. John. If St. John was by-elected, as his second shrievalty in 1534-5 suggests, he and Gascoigne were presumably returned again in 1536 in accordance with the King’s general request for the reelection of the previous Members. Gostwick secured the junior knighthood in 1539 and the senior one in December 1544, but his death in the following spring, seven months before the Parliament met, must have occasioned a by-election of which no trace has been found.7

Sir John St. John, who had sat in 1539 and 1542, was nominated by the Duke of Northumberland, in Edward VI’s name, for election to the Parliament of March 1553; his daughter was married to Francis Russell, whose father the 1st Earl of Bedford was a leading Councillor and who was himself summoned to the Lords in his father’s barony. Nominated with St. John was Lewis Dyve, who was elected, whereas St. John was not, the second place going to Sir Humphrey Radcliffe, a younger son of the 1st Earl of Sussex married into a Bedfordshire family. Local resentment at government intervention, which might have explained St. John’s rejection, evidently did not extend to Dyve, and it may be that St. John, who had stood down in favour of his son at the last election, did not wish to sit again. The house of Radcliffe was in favour under Mary, and Sir Humphrey, who retained his office at court, was re-elected for Bedfordshire to all but the first of her Parliaments; his senior partner in three of them, Sir John Mordaunt, was a Privy Councillor.8

Election indentures, all in Latin, survive for all the Parliaments from 1542 to 1558 except those of 1545 and 1555 (when the name of the senior Member is supplied from the dorse of the writ), although several are in poor condition. The contracting parties are the sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and between about eight and 20 or more electors: Sir John St. John heads the list of electors in September 1547, when his son was elected, and is also named in September 1553.9

Bedfordshire was one of the counties where new gaols were to be erected under an Act of 1532 (23 Hen. VIII, c. 2), which was renewed in 1536, 1545 and 1553. A bill for separate sheriffs in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire was introduced into the Commons in April 1554 but not enacted.10